Consumer Education

We remain committed to your financial education and financial security. We will use this space to keep you up-to-date on topics related to financial literacy and education, and how you can protect yourself from online fraud, identity theft, phishing scams and other security topics.

Prequalification or preapproval will give you an idea of whether or not you qualify for a mortgage, and if so, how much you qualify for. While some may think these two things are interchangeable, they are not the same thing.

For many new graduates, trading in the school life for the working world can be a crash course in adulting. Establishing financial independence ranks up there as one of the most important new responsibilities. We want all of the young people in our community to feel well-prepared for their financial future.

In order to create strong passwords they must be unique, long, a combination of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters, and not easily guessable. Remembering 90 passwords is not possible, so consider a password manager.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an independent agency of the U.S. government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector opened its doors in 2011. Since that time, the organization has heard from homebuyers that the documents used in buying a home are overwhelming and confusing, and that they often lack adequate time to review them before signing on the dotted line.

Phishing is a high-tech scam that uses spam or pop-up messages to deceive you into disclosing your credit card numbers, bank account information, social security number, passwords or other sensitive information.